what would you be doing today if you only had 37 days to live?

25 June 2006

Say hi to Yaron

Update: The rockets from Lebanon into Israel are hitting less than 7 miles from my friend, Yaron. Please keep him in your thoughts, won't you?

“Judging is a
lonely job in which a man is, as near as may be, an island entire.” -Abe Fortas

A few years ago, I boarded a flight that
changed my life. As I boarded that plane, I know now that I was walking away
from one life and into another, but at the time it felt like I was just going
to Parsippany.

I was
in no mood for idle chitchat on this flight; my seatmate had better shut up and
act engrossed in the in-flight magazine, all those lovely trinkets in the
SkyMall catalog, or some inane movie about the father of the bride or a wedding planner starring Steve Martin or Jennifer Lopez. I
just wanted some peace and quiet. It had been a hell of a trip so far and I was
in no mood to go to New Jersey; I just wanted to go home.

Of
course, I had been saved from hydraulic
doom only to be punished on this flight. In fact, this was my return flight
home from that trip to Florida, the one where the plane’s
hydraulic system failed. [Turns out, we get just what we need when we need it,
sometimes.] My seatmate was a very large man, a broad-faced wonder, a man whose
belly was not to be contained in a too-small t-shirt from the Grand Canyon, but poured over into my
space instead, over the arm rest and into my air, my real estate, my 12B.

Great.
That’s just great. I put on my Power
Suit Mask and opened my book, an erudite book of poems in their original German
by Rainer Maria Rilke; I keep it in my carry-on bag for just such
emergencies—it stops people cold in their tracks, usually.

Not
this time.

Grand
Canyon Man rifled incessantly through a loud plastic grocery bag that he kept
between his feet on the floor, then up in his lap, then down again. The sound
was overwhelming, as if the universe had focused its sound boom on that one
piece of plastic, amplifying it beyond all measure: I could hear nothing else.
Every movement he made moved me too. I was irritated.

Suddenly,
without any warning, there was a loud explosion from his lap. The large, family-sized bag of
pretzels he had burst open was thrust before me; I was shocked into silence,
only nodding a fierce no and returning to my Rilke.

How shall I hold on to my
soul, so that it does not touch yours, indeed? Maybe when he wrote those words, Rilke
hadn’t been in a plane seat where everything touches. How shall I lift it gently up over you on to other things? I would so
very much like to tuck it away among long lost objects in the dark, in some
quiet, unknown place, somewhere which remains motionless when your depths
resound.

Yeah,
all that Rainer, and a little space for breathing and leaning back in my very
own 12B would be nice, too.

It
grew dark as we passed through clouds; suddenly, Large Plastic Bag Grand Canyon
Pretzel Man reached up and turned on my light for me, still not speaking.
Perhaps he is mute. He looks Aleutian. An Aleutian mute, that’s just great.
After the day I’ve had. Near death, bad speech, egomaniac co-author, and now
this. I’m not proud of my attitude at that moment, but there it is for all the
world to see. Don’t we all do this sometimes, creating histories for people
based on nothing more than what we see?

I
just really, really needed to be left alone. I didn’t want to engage. What was
so hard to understand about this? Could Large Plastic Bag Grand Canyon Mute Aleutian Pretzel Man
not understand that?

I
nodded with a forced grin to acknowledge his gentlemanly intrusion. A hydraulic
failure would be preferable, I remember thinking to myself. Then it hit me. I’ve
just given a speech to 12,000 people about, among other things, not judging
people by how they look.

I determined, between sips of Diet Coke, to be nicer, to reclaim my humanity, to
try—dear sweet god—to restore what little karma I had left. When I saw Large Plastic
Bag Grand Canyon Mute Aleutian Pretzel Man taking photos out of the plane
window with a disposable Kodak, I made my move.

“What
are you taking photographs of?” I asked in that slow, loud, excruciatingly
enunciated and ineffectual voice sometimes used with non-English speakers. “We
don’t have rivers this big in Israel,” he answered slowly in halting
English, in a beautiful Israeli accent. One of my dearest and wisest friends in
the Whole Wide World is a man from
Israel. I turned to face this fabulous voice. “Where are you from in Israel?” I asked. And with that,
we began a friendship that endures even now, years later.

Yaron was a policeman in Netanya, an Israeli
resort town. He and his police partner saved their money for five years to come
to the U.S.; when her grandmother died
the week before the trip, it was clear he would have to come alone. Unsure of
his English and here for the first time, he toured the U.S. by himself, no doubt the
constant beneficiary of the kind of cold reaction I had given him. He brought
police insignia badges from Israel to trade with policemen in
the U.S.; I’m still constantly
bartering with policemen I meet to get badges to send him for his collection.

“I
have traveled all over the United States in these three weeks,” he
said in his slow voice. “I rented a tiny car in Los Angeles and drove to the Grand Canyon,” he said, holding his
large hands very close together, mimicking how small a steering wheel his
budget, compact car had. “When you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon,” he continued, “you want
to turn to the person next to you, don’t you, just to say ‘look, look at
that!’”

“I
didn’t have anybody to turn to,” he said quietly.

"I went to Disneyworld in Florida and while I was there, my
video camera broke. I couldn’t help myself; I started crying in the middle of
the street. One of the workers saw me and gave me this little paper camera so I
could take pictures while I was there. But you know,” he said, looking straight
at me, “it’s not the same. When you see a field of wheat blowing in the breeze,
it’s so much different than just seeing a still picture of the wheat, isn’t
it?”

It
occurred to me at that moment that I was in the presence of someone who had a
poet’s soul all wrapped up in a policeman’s body.

“Yes,”
I answered. “it’s very different.”

We
talked the whole way to Newark. It turns out that I had
sat beside Yaron on his very last night in the United States; he was taking a city bus
from the airport to a distant relative’s house somewhere in New Jersey before flying out the next
day to go home.

When
we landed, the car and driver my client had arranged to meet me at the airport
was nowhere to be found. It was yet another gift. Yaron and I went to a coffee
shop in the airport to talk; we emerged three hours later. He told me about his
life, about his fiancée going to the market three days before their wedding and
being killed by a truck on the way home, his large sausage fingers slowly
moving to just under his eyes where he held them for a moment to serve as log
jams for the tears that had collected. He talked about his part-time design business:
“You have to see what I got!” he said, digging deeply in one of the bags that
surrounded his feet. “It is so beautiful!” His broad face lit up at the very
thought of it.

He
rooted around for a good while. “I asked the manager if I could please have one
because I had never seen anything like it!” he said excitedly. And finally, he
sat up again, his large hands dwarfing a Shoney’s menu. “Isn’t this beautiful?!”
he said. “Just look at the color!”

Yaron
was planning to find a city bus to take him to his final destination; I just couldn’t
have his experience in the U.S. end that way. “Come with
me,” I said. “We’ll get a cab together and I’ll take you to your cousin’s
house.”

“Well,”
I answered. “We’ll go to where he’s going first and then we’ll turn around and
go where I’m going,” I said. “No, m’am, that’ll cost you over $150; you really
need two cabs.”

“I appreciate that you’re trying to save me
money, but we need to go together,” I said, insistent on delivering Yaron
safely with all his bags and Shoney's menus. I couldn’t bear the image of him
lugging those bags onto a city bus, unsure of where he was going, perhaps not
being met on the other end by his cousin. It just wouldn’t do. It wasn’t the
image of the U.S. I wanted to leave him
with. The man deserved far better.

We
got lost many times on that journey to his cousin’s house; the drive gave us
more time to talk. And after I dropped Yaron off, his cousin waving quizzically
from her front door, my cab started backtracking to Parsippany. My driver was not
only 110-years-old, but directionally challenged as well, it turns out. Hours into
this hour-and-a-half trip, I called John on my cell phone, quietly whispering
from the back seat so as not to embarrass the driver: “John? John? Listen, I’m
in a car on the New Jersey Turnpike. Can you pull up Mapquest on the computer?
I see a highway sign for Maui. I think we’re lost.” By this time, it was
many hours after I should have been in my hotel room, getting my beauty sleep
for another big speech the next day; John was alarmed by the whispering.
“Patti, Patti,” I heard the urgency in his voice. “Have you been kidnapped? If
you have, just use the word ‘umbrella’ in your next sentence and read me the
next highway sign you see. I’ll call the Highway Patrol.” He wasn’t kidding.

I convinced him that I was okay, just lost; John and Mapquest got me to my
hotel in Parsippany, finally.

Yaron called the next morning to wish me
well in my speech. He calls from Israel every Christmas eve and
names all of Santa’s reindeer even though Santa isn’t part of his cultural
tradition. He stays up late to call us on New Year’s Eve. When he found out
that John’s grandmother, Nana, was a devout Catholic, he sent Holy Water from
the River Jordan for us to give her. “And just so you know it isn’t water from
my bathroom, I made a video of me getting it from the River Jordan,” he said.
Sure enough, the water arrived with a videotape of him driving (and filming at
the same time) to the River Jordan. He videotaped the River Jordan sign
followed by shaky camera motion while the video camera was set on a rock and
Yaron ran in front of the lens, bending down with a Fanta bottle, scooping Holy
Water into it.

What
would I have missed in my life if I hadn’t said hello?

~*~ 37 Days:
Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Say hi to
Yaron. You
never know when you might be the highlight in a trip, a needed word, a special
kindness. You never know when you might find the friend you’ve needed or the
learning that changes everything for you.

And move
from "what" to "who"; see life in video. This wasn’t Large Plastic Bag Grand Canyon Mute Aleutian
Pretzel Man; he was a real person with a name and a history and stories that
make him laugh and cry; he was a “who” not a “what,” just like me.

It turns
out, just like the field of wheat Yaron described, we need to see people moving
in real time video, not just as static snapshots of one moment in time taken
with a disposable camera. People aren’t, it turns out, disposable—in the widest
sense of that word, in any language.

I will keep thoughts of this story in my head as I board my plane in July, on my first business trip in over a year. It will help me keep my fellow travelers in perspective and give me a new way to look at whoever shows up in the seat next to me.

I wonder how many more friends we would make by simply saying "Hi, who are you?"

Since moving to the US I have observed a certain lack of interest in the other person in the people I have been meeting. They are quite self-absorbed, rarely return questions and conversations float along a shallow edge. I have to admit that this is making it more difficult for me to make new friends. I am used to more open and curious communications, where there is a genuine interest in one another.

It could very well be just these particular people, like my husband's work colleagues, and I know better than to generalise. Just take the blogging community, I know that there are lots of likeminded people out here who are anything but shallow.

The kind of friendship that you describe with Yaron warms my heart, I am glad that you decided to take your own advice and got rewarded so beautifully.

The world needs more friendships like these, they are what will save us.

What I see so often is that people don't returning questions - something I've been teaching my daughter, Emma -- that if someone asks you a question, you answer and ask one in return, expressing interest in the other person. It was one of the rules that Ron Clark taught his students in Harlem (see his book, The Essential 55) and so powerful, yet seldom done - all you have to do is pay attention to the patterns in conversations to see that questions are usually one-way in a conversation...don't get me started!

It's like a ping-pong match with only one paddle, the ball simply continues on its trajectory to the wall, with no return. Can you tell you touched a nerve? ;-) Thanks!

There were, as usual, about 300 things I shoulda been doing when I saw the little red flag beside this post. Whether it was approach avoidance to one or all of that holy 300, I clicked on 37 days and got about 37 tears and one very wide smile. The daintyness of some of his gestures (as described so observantly) contrasted with his bulk seemed so incongruous. His choice to travel alone was a promise loyally kept to his fiancee. And the paper camera an invitation for you to unwittingly, resistantly,foot draggingly, get in touch with your 37 days self. And for me to get in touch with the possibility that I could make a teensy click that would make attacking my tasks so much more, well, fun isnt exactly the right word, but with a lighter hand, well, no, ahh with a lighter heart. Yaron's lack of self pity when he described not having someone to say, Look at that! comes to mind.
How much to admire and learn from a man who can have the grief but not be the grief. Like his bag of pretzels, his childlike sense of wonder and his braveness at forging on, exploded over me. I wonder exactly how many times I will need to learn that lesson of not judging a book by its cover.

Oh, so beautiful. I am one of those, say hello to everyone super friendly types, being a barmaid in a former life, and I think a lot of folks hold back because of fear.
I love love love this post. I am envious of your friendship with Yaron.